Religion V: Utopianism, Fundamentalism, Apothesis

[Sci-2]

The Archbishop of Canterbury on how blasphemy can be a means to deeper religious understanding.

"...Blasphemy of this kind is risky because there may indeed turn out to be nothing left on the far side. You test the limits of your faith and discover that when you have rejected the God of infantile satisfactions and securities, what remains is not the transformed and elusive God of a ­Simone Weil, but just nothing. Which is why religious institutions don’t exactly encourage these transgressive experiments, why they are so often suppressed with passionate severity and violence.

But this is where we come up against the main catch-22 of the whole thing. If you are forbidden to voice the hard questions, this might suggest that faith survives only by never being challenged. The person who actually expresses their fury or disgust or disillusion can, at least sometimes, be ­demonstrating faith of a sort, confidence that, if God is real, it is possible, even necessary, to say what you feel about Him – and that, unless you can say this, the God you started with is not worth believing in. This underpins many of the Jewish Psalms or the poems of George Herbert or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Blasphemy resists the conspiracy of silence about the agonising difficulties of belief, resists the stifling of a real and honest response to an unjust world.

It is in the light of all this that, for many religious people, legislating against blasphemy is a deeply ironic thing. The project of punishing blasphemy with the fullest rigour of the law can imply a God anxious about His safety, whose power is uncomfortably like any arbitrary human power – insecure and needing to be held in place by violence. Legislating against blasphemy is always in danger of suggesting that God needs human protection and that faith is so frail that it cannot survive exposure to honest human emotion or intelligence.

In practice, such legislation has a deeply unimpressive history..."

[TrueMetis]

"this might suggest that faith survives only by never being challenged."

He's surprisingly self aware.

[Sci-2]

Moving on from karmic caste systems, ironic New Atheist fundamentalism, and Jesus pulling a Dr. Mengele at the end of time, here's a more coherent religious metaphysics that isn't Otherkinism (though that too is better than the aforementioned, as I've successfully argued elsewhere):

“If sweetness can win”: The religious discourse of Adventure Time

Adventure Time is a cartoon series currently in its fifth season on Cartoon Network. It is nominally a children’s show, and children do watch it, but given the complex narrative, characters and cosmology that the series develops, it deserves adults’ attention as well. Its setting is Ooo, a magical landscape that teems with diverse, intelligent, non-human beings. These beings are the descendants of people and animals that mutated after the nuclear apocalypse, or “Great Mushroom War,”one thousand years before the series’ action takes place. In this essay I analyze the religious elements of Adventure Time, drawing parallels with various religious traditions in order to flesh out these elements’ implications.

I argue that the series acts as a “counter-hegemonic discourse” in the context of the contemporary American religious landscape, challenging mainstream Christian conceptions of eschatology, cosmology, death, morality and suffering, and developing an alternate narrative through which to understand ourselves, our world and our future.

[Castel]

The New Atheist moniker/movement is the best thing to ever happen to people who want to write (and link :worried: )the same article a hundred times.

[Sci-2]

The New Atheist moniker/movement is the best thing to ever happen to people who want to write (and link :worried: )the same article a hundred times.

Have I ever linked that article? I don't recall doing so.

In any case it was merely a reference, the focal point is the Good News of Adventure Time. (Or, for those who need a religion that's better than most but not based on a cartoon, Otherkinism. No one has flown a plane into a building for Otherkinism after all.)

[Castel]

Have I ever linked that article? I don't recall doing so.

That article? No.

But then, it's not really fruit right at the top of the tree y'know? The only thing that varies is how much you pad the argument or beat on Sam Harris for attempting philosophy. Well, and which faiths you''ll defend (mostly the faiths of least interest to these fundamentalists)

I suppose I have no right to snark, since it's less that I think there's nothing problematic about those writers and more that I just find the go-around tedious, which I suppose is pretty narcissistic.

Also: I thought you disliked Otherkinism?

Also Also: I thought that was a supposed (in their minds) physical identity, not a religion?

[Sci-2]

But then, it's not really fruit right at the top of the tree y'know? The only thing that varies is how much you pad the argument or beat on Sam Harris for attempting philosophy. Well, and which faiths you''ll defend (mostly the faiths of least interest to these fundamentalists)

I don't have a problem with any particular faiths as overarching categories. In terms of morality the ones with karma/sin debt systems are morally repugnant though at the least they describe things that might exist in possible worlds. This differs from the computationalist faith of uploading brains into virtual realities and granting rights to programs, which is just nothing more than delusion. As if a computer program could be any more conscious than a particular arrangement of an abacus.

I suppose I have no right to snark, since it's less that I think there's nothing problematic about those writers and more that I just find the go-around tedious, which I suppose is pretty narcissistic.

Heh, remember the important thing is why Adventure Time should replace previous religions. Don't get too distracted with a linked reference I just put in as something of a footnote.

Also: I thought you disliked Otherkinism?

I like that it works well as an example. In terms of metaphysics, moral track record, and all the varied metrics religions use to "prove" their God's dick is bigger than the other gods' dicks (as George Carlin put it) I think it's easy to make an argument for why Otherkinism or Adventure Time-ism would come out ahead. It's also interesting that someone can laugh at the idea of someone being the reincarnation of an elf but then expect stuff like "sin" removed by "resurrection" (and the ensuing rescue of the "soul" from "Hell") to be taken seriously.

From another angle - when people talk about the importance of respecting and accommodating religions one can ask to what extremes would be people be willing to accept those who want to express their inner animal, fantasy creature, etc. I find when people claim to be passionate about a principle the truth is usually that the passion dissipates for claims that diverge from particular examples the person was motivated by. (See bodily autonomy discussions of yore.)

But if Freedom of Religion is conditional, even before direct harm to others is involved, where exactly is the line on what we should feel obligated to protect and what we can simply corral/block/remove? If it's reasonable for me to not employ someone who surgically altered themselves to look like a wolf and who wishes to howl every so often, can I similarly refuse to employ someone who is going to wear a headscarf or put ashes on their forehead on particular Wednesdays?

Also Also: I thought that was a supposed (in their minds) physical identity, not a religion?

This is where I think things get rather interesting. How does one deal with subjective claims of personal gnosis that are, at least to an extent, akin to those claims made by someone of religious faith?

Does this sort of claim need to be grounded in known science? Should we accept such claims in principle so long as the "fist" of the claim doesn't hit anyone's "nose"? What's our societal responsibility to help said persons fulfill a change in physical form?

I don't even pretend to have answers to those questions, though I do think there is a distinction to be made between transgendered persons and Otherkin....yet I'm not sure I can formulate the distinction in a way that isn't dependent on my existing moral intuitions or appeals to a particular accepted scientific consensus...it's actually both unsatisfying and a bit worrying.

[Castel]

I don't have a problem with any particular faiths as overarching categories.

I didn't mean you personally. The really vociferous critics seem to either be the ones that hate the "Islamophobia" of Harris or the ones that just want to drag their own little religion (with all the uncomfortable bits shorn off) out of the path of his incoming wave.

This is where I think things get rather interesting. How does one deal with subjective claims of personal gnosis that are, at least to an extent, akin to those claims made by someone of religious faith?

I think an important difference here, the one I was thinking of is social. If Otherkinism is about your identity then it's not claiming to have some universal knowledge available for anyone to look is it? It's limited in a way that perhaps even neopagan religions aren't. Well, that's from my limited understanding of it anyway.

This doesn't necessarily make it non-religious and it's certainly making claims about reality but I just that that's a meaningful difference, in my mind.

I don't even pretend to have answers to those questions, though I do think there is a distinction to be made between transgendered persons and Otherkin....yet I'm not sure I can formulate the distinction in a way that isn't dependent on my existing moral intuitions or appeals to a particular accepted scientific consensus...it's actually both unsatisfying and a bit worrying.

I don't see why your existing moral intuitions are a problem unless they're clearly aimed at pragmatically protecting the cause. For example, refusing to even discuss Otherkin because it hurts the LGBT acceptance movement.

But you're right.I'm worse than you in that I'm fully guilty of taking a pretty lazy view on this. When my moral intuitions were being formed transpeople made it across the drawbridge in time. Otherkin...didn't. Truth be told, even if some evidence shows up in its favor I slightly recoil at the thought of having to someday seriously decide if Elf ears will be allowed in the workplace along with headscarves.

I think the same thing happens to things like polygamy. The problems and the lack of any concerted effort to make people care just let us dismiss it.

[Gears of the Beast]

Moving on from karmic caste systems, ironic New Atheist fundamentalism

Did you actually read this incoherent babble?

[Gears of the Beast]

Speaking of that label, in case anyone is confused as to what people mean by "new atheists".

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

GotB,

Oversimplification for the win!

[Castel]

GotB,

Oversimplification for the win!

While I do believe people like Dawkins partly do it to themselves the term really is more useful for promoting debates and books and separating out a convenient subgroup than anything, despite its seemingly innocuous nature. It's a sort of "SJW", basically.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Castel,

Perhaps. I find aggressive evangelicals of most stripes offputing.

[Castel]

Castel,

Perhaps. I find aggressive evangelicals of most stripes offputing.

Funnily enough, that was also the justification for using SJW as a pejorative, which I recall you weren't pleased about at all.

So it seems that you and Gears are kinda on the same page here :)

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Castel,

Hmmm...

[Sci-2]

Speaking of that label, in case anyone is confused as to what people mean by "new atheists".

Nah, the skeptic Massimo does a good job explaining the difference here:

Reflections on the skeptic and atheist movements

My disengagement has been gradual and not really planned, but rather the result of an organic change of priorities and interests. It has, however, also been accelerated by a number of observations and individual incidents. The most recent one, which finally prompted me to write these reflections for public consumption, was a private email exchange between Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris, which was eventually made public by the latter [13].

I have read quite a bit of Sam Harris (too much, in fact), and I have made it very clear what I think of him [14]. I have also read quite a bit of Chomsky (not enough, unfortunately), and he is one of the few people that I honestly regard as a role model, both as an intellectual and as a human being.

Of course Chomsky had his own excellent observation about this movement, as I noted in the thread examining the overly self-inflated worth of the atheist evangelicals.

[Eponine]

Castel,

Perhaps. I find aggressive evangelicals of most stripes offputing.

Do you think it's a personality trait rather than something connected to any one belief? In my experience, the formerly Christian atheists who most want to shove their beliefs down your throat are often people who as Christians were bombastic pastors, cult of personality type leaders, and rabid evangelists. I've often found that only the message changed, not the person. And of course, people like this are likely to clamp on to the organizations and opportunities in their new group that give them a chance to be the loudest.

[Sci-2]

Do you think it's a personality trait rather than something connected to any one belief? In my experience, the formerly Christian atheists who most want to shove their beliefs down your throat are often people who as Christians were bombastic pastors, cult of personality type leaders, and rabid evangelists. I've often found that only the message changed, not the person. And of course, people like this are likely to clamp on to the organizations and opportunities in their new group that give them a chance to be the loudest.

Excellent observation. Isn't John C Wright a good case of asshole atheist becomes asshole Christian?

[OnionAhaiReborn]

Nah, the skeptic Massimo does a good job explaining the difference here:

Reflections on the skeptic and atheist movements

Of course Chomsky had his own excellent observation about this movement, as I noted in the thread examining the overly self-inflated worth of the atheist evangelicals.

These people are saying very different things. Massimo dislikes certain specific 'New Atheist' personalities (though he points to a 'New Atheist' that I'm not familiar with, Dan Denett, as someone he likes and considers thoughtful) and the cult of celebrity around them and wishes to separate from them but still says he considers the skeptic and atheist movement a worthwhile endeavor which he will engage in. Chomsky says there's no reason to bother with it at all, and 'state religion' should be criticized instead. I don't think there is, in fact, any observation there, just categorical disagreement with their (or Chomsky's imagining of their) aims.

So are 'New Atheists' defined as celebrity assholes and their fans, per Massimo, or anyone engaged in pointless advocacy on secularism, atheism, skepticism etc. (which would include Massimo), per Chomsky?

[Sci-2]

Why not both? :dunno:

Though I don't think Chomsky would agree that secularist advocacy is pointless?